Israeli-Palestinian negotiations

By S.P.SETH

One thing can be said about the Israeli-Palestinian talks that they are not going to advance the peace process in any meaningful way. In the first place, these are being held under US pressure, with Israel unwilling to concede any ground. The Palestinians have already lost much of their homeland, first with the creation of the state of Israel and, secondly, with the Israeli occupation of West Bank, Gaza (blockaded and pounded by the Israeli forces at will), East Jerusalem and much more.

Israel continues to create new “realities” on ground by building new settlements and demolishing Palestinian homes, as well as creating an apartheid state with Palestinian territories surrounded and blockaded by the Israeli army. And there is the long so-called security wall Israel has built, poaching more Palestinian land and dividing families.

What it means is that Palestine has nothing to negotiate with, except to reclaim their land. They have already been stripped of much of their homeland and resources. Therefore, they have nothing more to give Israel. In any case, Israel has never felt the need to ask the Palestinians, as and when they have felt like grabbing whatever. They have always taken by force whatever they needed and more, and there is no end to it.

The pertinent question then is: why has the world turned a blind eye to Israel’s rapacious plunder of the Palestinian people and their homeland? More recently: why is the world so de-sensitized to the sufferings of the Palestinian people so graphically and inhumanly portrayed by the photos posted on the internet regarding the treatment of blindfolded Palestinian prisoners, with an Israeli woman soldier posing nearby triumphantly in a state of utter satisfaction with her work.

To further compound the humiliation of the Palestinian people, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, spiritual leader of Israel’s powerful ultra-orthodox political movement, Shas, a constiutuent of Prime Minister Banjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government, has declared the Palestinians “evil people who should perish from this earth.” He has called upon God to “strike them with a plague…these evil-doers and Israel-haters.”

Rabbi Yosef is a former chief rabbi of Israel. Such hatred spewed by a man of God, and that too by a representative of the Jewish people who historically suffered so much persecution, including holocaust, is beyond comprehension.

Prime Minister Netanyahu, who will be in Washington for negotiations with the Palestinians, refused to condemn the Rabbi’s remarks invoking God’s wrath on the Palestinians, although he did say that it didn’t reflect his government’s views. The point, though, is that with such extreme and incendiary views held by the spiritual leader of an important segment of the Israeli government, what hope is there for any satisfactory outcome of the talks in Washington.

Rabbi Yosef is not the only one holding such views in Israel. Take the case of Effi Eitam, a former cabinet minister, war hero, and Netanyahu’s special emissary. He reportedly said in 2006, “We’ll have to expel the overwhelming majority of West Bank Arabs [Palestinians] from here [West Bank] and remove Israeli Arabs from [our] political system.”

Israel’s foreign minister, Avigdor Leiberman is, pushing measures to strip Palestinians, living in Israel, of their citizenship for all sorts of supposed infractions.

In other words, many Israelis regard Palestinians as sub-human and hence not deserving of human rights. The sad thing is that the Jews were also caricatured in Europe and the United States as people who somehow lacked values and qualities of the majority Christian populations, and were not entitled to full rights.

Against this backdrop, it is hard to comprehend the hatred and inhumanity of Rabi Yosef and others in Israel. One would expect that Israelis, of all the people, should know better, as their ancestors suffered the kind of cruelty they are now hurling at the Palestinians.

The question then is: why is Israel getting away with it? The answer simply is that Israel is coddled and protected by the United States and its European allies. As an instance, while the United States and allies are set against nuclear proliferation, targeting North Korea and Iran, Israel’s nuclear arsenal somehow never features in any such discussion and sanctions. As a victim of holocaust, Israel is treated as a special state, not subject to normal international rules and conventions. As a result, it has never felt the kind of pressure to conform to international norms that other states might feel obliged to do.

Therefore, there is no reason for Israel to be conciliatory and accommodative of Palestinian aspirations, as it goes into a new round of talks with the Palestinians. The Israeli side insists on negotiations without pre-conditions. Which means that they are not going to entertain the Palestinians’ basic demand for a state based on the 1967 borders, before the Israelis annexed West Bank and other Palestinian territories. They are, in effect, asking the Palestinians to accept a formal surrender of their homeland in favor, at best, of a few local councils under Israeli supervision and control. The Israelis simply want their mythical (Biblical) state of Judea and Samaria.

In his article in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books, Peter Beinart says that, “…Netanyahu not only rejects the idea of a Palestinian state, he denies that there is such a thing as a Palestinian…” Indeed, according to Netanyahu, Israel has already made big concessions by abandoning its claim to Jordan that should be part of the Jewish state. With such strong views about Israel’s territoriality, it is difficult o believe that Netanyahu will suddenly turn into a believer on the way to Washington.

Peter Beinart’s long-term prognosis is equally, if not more, frightening because of, “…an ultra-Orthodox population that is increasing dramatically, a settler movement that is growing more radical and more entrenched in the Israeli bureaucracy and army, and a Russian immigrant community that is particularly prone to anti-Arab racism.”

While one wishes the Washington Israeli-Palestinian negotiations all the success, but the realities on the ground do point in the other direction.

Note: This article was first published in Daily Times